Principal Database Engineer, Data Engineering

An overview of this role

As a Principal Database Engineer, you’ll design and lead the evolution of the PostgreSQL backbone that powers GitLab.com and thousands of self-managed enterprise deployments. You’ll solve critical challenges around uncontrolled data growth, complex upgrades and migrations, and always-on reliability at global scale, creating the database patterns and platforms that keep GitLab fast, resilient, and cost efficient as usage grows. You’ll architect scalable, distributed database solutions, build proactive health and reliability frameworks, and drive adoption of modern database technologies and data stores that improve both product capabilities and production stability. Working hands-on in the codebase and partnering closely with product and infrastructure teams, you’ll turn long-term database strategy into incremental, customer-visible improvements, shift incident response from reactive to proactive, and help define GitLab’s next-generation data architecture, including sharding and multi-database support.

What you’ll do

• Lead the architecture and strategy for GitLab.com's PostgreSQL infrastructure, designing scalable, resilient solutions for both SaaS and self-managed deployments.
• Build proactive database health and reliability frameworks using continuous monitoring, automated remediation, and predictive analytics to prevent customer-impacting incidents.
• Drive database best practices across engineering by guiding schema design, migrations, and query optimization, and by creating self-service tools and guardrails for product teams.
• Own end-to-end observability for database systems, designing symptom-based monitoring, leading incident response, and turning learnings into automated, repeatable workflows.
• Shape the evolution of GitLab’s database platform by evaluating and implementing modern database technologies and data stores that improve reliability, performance, and product capabilities.
• Design solutions and patterns that address uncontrolled data growth, cost efficiency, sharding, multi-database support, and other next-generation data architecture needs.
• Collaborate closely with product and infrastructure teams to align product decisions with platform constraints and priorities, breaking down long-term goals into incremental, customer-visible outcomes.
• Contribute directly to the codebase to prototype and ship working solutions, maintain technical credibility, and deep-dive into complex production issues when needed.

What you’ll bring

• Experience architecting, operating, and optimizing PostgreSQL in large-scale, distributed production environments with high availability and disaster recovery requirements.
• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL internals, including the query planner, write-ahead logging, vacuum processes, and storage engine behavior.
• Background designing and maintaining highly distributed database platforms with automated failover, robust monitoring, and self-healing capabilities.
• Hands-on coding skills and comfort working across the stack, from low-level database and search systems to backend and frontend services.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code, GitOps practices, security hardening, and site reliability engineering principles applied to database operations.
• Ability to debug complex, cross-system issues, translate findings into durable technical solutions, and turn incident learnings into repeatable automation.
• Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams, providing practical guidance on migrations, query optimization, and database best practices.
• Openness to collaborating with people from diverse technical backgrounds, with a focus on clear communication, shared ownership, and learning transferable skills.

About the team

Data Engineering and Monetization is a function within the Engineering organization with a mission to build a comprehensive foundation of data platforms with responsible data architecture that scales. We focus on the databases and data systems that power GitLab.com and self-managed deployments, partnering closely with product and infrastructure teams across regions in an all-remote, asynchronous way. As part of this group, you’ll help shape how we handle data growth, reliability, and modernization of our database platform, creating patterns and tools that other engineering teams can adopt. For more on how we work, see the Team Handbook Page.